Working With Google? You've Got to Embrace Co-opetition

Last week my 3Q Digital colleague Susan Waldes wrote a blog post exploring all the ways that Google is steadily encroaching
on the turf of third-party campaign management companies like Marin Software and Kenshoo. Susan wrote: So, is Google trying to kill third-party platforms? I’m not sure if
it’s premeditated or simply happenstance; inarguable is that the cost/benefit of the third parties is already radically diminished and trending to be more so.

I have a slightly different
take on this theory. First off, I don’t think Google is particularly focused on killing off third-party platforms – I think Google is generally focused on competing
with anyone and anything online. Indeed, throughout Google’s history, the company has done a pretty good job of attacking other Internet players. I believe Google’s attack strategy started
in the early days as a battle against Yahoo and AOL (by building a better search engine, better email, better news, and better maps), moved on to eBay (Google Checkout vs. PayPal, Google Shopping vs.
Shopping.com, and Google Talk to beat Skype), then to Microsoft (Google Docs vs. Office), then Apple (Android vs. iPhone, Chromebook vs. Mac, Google Play vs. iTunes, Chromecast vs. Apple TV), and now
Facebook (Google+).

Along the way, the company has also made tons of investments in ad tech, mainly as a way to have control over what data advertisers see and to diversify revenue away from
just search clicks. Examples include: Google Analytics (analytics), DBM (DSP), DCM (Ad serving), DS3 (campaign management), GTM (tag management), Wildfire (social media), Teracent (creative), Channel
Intelligence (feed management), and a dozen other tools I’m probably forgetting.

Put another way, if you want to have a digital business, you’re going to have to compete against
Google. And given that Google now controls a lot of SEM, SEO, display, and email inventory, you’re also going to have to play nicely with Google as well. It’s a classic case of
“co-opetition.”

Given Google’s massive engineering resources and deep pockets, you might assume that Google can own any category it decides to enter. Yet as much as
Google has had great success penetrating some new markets, it has also had failures along the way. I look at Google’s expansion successes and failures from two lenses – a B2C (consumer)
and B2B (business) lens.

On the consumer side, Google has won markets with two simple concepts: Build a product that is “good enough” vis-à-vis the competition, and then
give it away for free or at a deep discount. Gmail beat Yahoo! Mail because it was better and free, Android has taken market share from iPhone because it is good enough and much cheaper, Chromebooks
are way cheaper than PCs, and you can bet that Google Fiber (Internet service) will be better and cheaper than whatever your cable company wants to sell you. (Note that Google+ has not taken off,
because Facebook is already free and the functionality of Google+ doesn’t seem to offer much of an incentive for consumers to switch.)

The business side is a tougher play. Businesses
care about three things: price, value, and trust. Google Analytics, for example, is much cheaper than Omniture (free versus tens of thousands of dollars a month) and is good enough for the majority of
companies out there, but it requires businesses to “open the kimono” to Google by sharing all of their data. Big companies pay for Omniture in part because they just don’t trust
Google with their data. The same is true – and will continue to be true – for campaign management tools. If a company is already hesitant to share Web analytics data with Google, you can
be sure that they won’t jump at the chance to also share revenue and offline conversion data with Big G. Indeed, I spoke to the CEO of a third-party tag management company who was overjoyed to
hear that Google has entered the tag management space. “It validates the market and will push many companies to go with someone other than Google,” he told me.

The other trust
issue Google has in the ad tech space is that some advertisers will always wonder where Google’s allegiances are – with Google’s profit or with theirs. Having the Google tech stack
manage your (largely Google) online advertising is sort of like having the IRS file your taxes for you. I’m not insinuating that Google would purposely manipulate your ad spend to drive
incremental profit for Google, but whenever you have a publisher managing your spend on its own platform, there’s definitely the potential for a conflict.

For a lot of
small advertisers, the “good enough” theory will apply; Google Analytics (for free) combined GTM (for free) with DS3 at a substantial discount over third-party campaign management tools
may be a great solution. For bigger advertisers – especially those who have products or services that compete with Google – there will always be valid competitive reasons to stick to
third-party tool providers. So will Google take away some market share from third-party tools? It seems likely. Will there continue to be a growing need for third parties? Absolutely.

Nice piece David. When Google got started they were the anti-Microsoft. MSFT had gotten so bid and unwieldy, and was quickly becoming "big brother". No one trusted them and the market was desperate for an alternative. Enter Google, who had everyone rooting for them from the start as the underdog. GOOG has now filled the role that MSFT used to fill, and the "do no evil" mantra just doesn't hold up when you continuously crush the competitors in most markets that you enter. The unintended consequence of achieving Google's stature of a giant is that no matter how hard you try, you will do evil to someone (at a minimum your competitors). Giant's can't walk down the street w/out stepping on others. Google wins on price (because most don't realize the price they are paying is their data - if the product is free, you are the product). They can often win on value (but not always), and the loose on trust. And trust is the most difficult thing to build.

There's certainly visions of grandeur tied to an end-to-end stack and what that could mean for a marketer. However, as we known, marketing is a largely relationship-driven industry. Additionally various point solutions are different stages of product maturity and have spun-off specializations of feature sets tied to the specific verticals they find themselves in.
What is interesting to me is ultimately what each company optimizes against tied to key objectives... e.g., publisher/network revenue, margins, new channels, customer stickiness through features and so on-

R.J. and Erik, thanks for the comments. Definitely agree with you R.J. that it is hard to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to aggressive growth and trust (ergo my argument for the continued viability of 3rd party tools). And Erik, I also agree with you that the "one stop shop" solution always sounds great in theory but never seems to work as well as it should.

Good article. Google's own tracking is up to two days late. AdWords optimization is about information in real-time, based on that it could be wise to use a third party tool that can offer it.
My 2 cents,
Mikael